


a lost weekend

by darkcomedylateshow



Series: true western [2]
Category: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019)
Genre: M/M, Vignettes, i started working on this a LONG time ago and finally finished... pls enjoy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:53:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22169716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkcomedylateshow/pseuds/darkcomedylateshow
Summary: He has grown used to the way he drives — braking hard, swerving through traffic, the thrill of the foot on the gas — feeling his hand without ever touching him.
Relationships: Cliff Booth/Rick Dalton
Series: true western [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1475903
Comments: 19
Kudos: 150





	a lost weekend

**Author's Note:**

> _So they take off after each other straight into an endless black prairie. The sun is just comin' down and they can feel the night on their backs. What they don't know is that each one of 'em is afraid, see. Each one separately thinks that he's the only one that's afraid. And they keep ridin' like that straight into the night. Not knowing. And the one who's chasin' doesn't know where the other one is taking him. And the one who's being chased doesn't know where he's going._ — True West, Sam Shepard

**1966**

“How are you, old buddy?” he asks him, in a way so delicate Cliff knows he knows everything. 

* * *

**1959**

**friday**

“How do you do that?” Rick asks, pacing backwards across from Cliff, as they stumble back to his place.

“Do what?”

“Look all...”

Characters, Rick found, came from voice and posture, and once his body started to do the work his brain usually filled in the rest. Acting was purely muscle memory, like dancing or cycling. He throws his shoulders back, does a little sneer, adjusts his stance — a cartoon approximation of Cliff, who was, at that point, a total stranger he’d gotten drunk with about a half-dozen times. 

“Lookin’ all tough,” Rick says, finishing his thought. “Lookin’ all — storied. I know you should be copying me, not the other way around, but I lack foundation. I hardly have a — a leg to fuckin’ stand on.”

They’d looped to back to talking about himself. The rehearsal leading up to shoot had exhausted Rick, who had had to work from the ground up. The critics that covered the serials had noticed this. (Of course he read his own reviews; how could he not?) _Dalton takes a while to come into his own as a gunslinging, tough-talking vigilante, relying on the chewing of scenery and tobacco for what should be character-defining scenes._ He knew he was phoning it in — that the character hardly existed to begin with, it began and ended with the expressions on his face — but what could he do?

“Sometimes I think I hate acting,” he says out loud, the beginning of a conversation they would be having for nine years straight. “Sometimes I think, I know I’m fucking terrible, but — here I am.” 

“Think of all the people worse than you,” says Cliff, who had learned to placate him already. “Besides, that brothel scene, that was some high fuckin’ drama back there.” 

“Exactly. Who — who the fuck would write something like that? Even if it’s true.” 

“It’s not your fault. It’s the material.” 

“No. No, it’s me.” 

As they approach his block, they fall into stride. Cliff looks off, chewing a toothpick thoughtfully. Finally he says: “I think if I watched myself on TV every week, I’d go insane.” 

Rick looks incredulous. “That’s half the fun.”

* * *

Once, before they knew each other very well, Cliff had seen Rick try to negotiate the 101 — he remembered him leaned forward forty five degrees and white-knuckling the wheel, nervous to merge. Maybe watching him had made Rick all the more nervous. He had probably grown up driving back roads, rickety two-laners in Missouri. Cliff could navigate the city like it was a treacherous prairie, a wide sea. The names of the exits on the freeway felt as if they’d been burned into his brain since birth, even though they’d only been finished a decade or so. 

He was a good driver, even during those fluke rainstorms that slowed everything to a halt, or when the sky looked enormous and nightmarish with smog and he sort of felt like he was driving through the gates of hell. It brought him an odd kind of comfort. It did for Rick, too. Those first few years, when they rode back and forth in near silence, Rick would often fall asleep in the passenger seat. 

(“Sorry,” Cliff mumbles, while they’re sitting in traffic, one night. “You know how it is when it rains.” It was only a squall, but the wet streets are enough to slow everything down. 

“Don’t worry.” Rick’s eyes stay closed. He has grown used to the way he drives — braking hard, swerving through traffic, the thrill of the foot on the gas — feeling his hand without ever touching him.)

* * *

Cliff hates this part of town, all the dingbat apartments made of white stucco, Rick’s car tucked beneath the sagging carport.

“You’re not coming up?” Rick asks, leaning on the stairwell. “No nightcap?” 

Cliff considers it. It’s the weekend, and he is very drunk. Nothing’s waiting for him back home. He’d just seen his old dog, Dusty, through pancreatic cancer, and the trailer was empty. 

He hoists himself up the stairs, watching Rick fumble with the keys. The apartment is grim, cluttered with empty bottles and discarded clothes. There’s an enormous pile of screenplays on the desk. These were the days when even though Rick hardly had a pot to piss in, he was still getting movie offers by the pile. There were sword-and-sandal epics (a dying art,) World War movies (dry, boring affairs, nowhere near their peak of spectacle and camp yet,) comedies where he’s supposed to play a Jack Lemmon type, some put-upon asshole (despite the fact that Rick’s acting was, unless carefully directed, deeply humorless.)

“I know it looks easy,” Rick says, shaking up another whiskey sour as Cliff flips through the stack. “You said it yourself. Show up, hit your marks, remember the lines."

“I didn’t say it was easy.” He frowns at him. “I couldn’t do it.”

“But really,” Rick goes on, “the expectations, they’re fuckin’ absurd, the kind of strain you put on a human being. All that Method crap, it’s — it's gonna send people to their graves, just because they think the ghost of Stanislavski told them to source real emotion. You’re not supposed to pull up those roots. You’re supposed to bottle ‘em up and bury them. You’re supposed to use your brain and your body and your experience. And then the emotions sort themselves the fuck out.” 

“Maybe that’s part of it,” Cliff starts to suggest, words tumbling out of him. “Maybe you need that under your belt. That feeling of walkin’ in somewhere you don’t belong, doing something you’re not supposed to.”

“What makes you think I don’t do things I’m not supposed to?” Rick asks, a glint in his eye. The booze has smoothed out his stutter.

Cliff just laughs. 

“Aw, forget it,” Rick says. “I’m broke as a fucking joke. I don’t need the performance of a career, I just need to keep the lights on."

“There are things you can do,” Cliff says, tactfully, “when you’re broke.”

“What, like breaking into houses?"

"That's not what I meant."

“The neighborhood’s dead.” Rick cradles his glass close. “Weekend after Christmas — everybody’s gone home, or Palm Springs.” 

“First of all,” Cliff says, still finding it all very funny, “what would you even steal?” 

“I don’t know, whatever I could carry. Jewelry. Liquor. You don’t wanna come with me? Maybe — maybe I need it, you know, for these outlaw roles — I should know what it's like, getting away with something you shouldn't. Maybe these fuckin' method actors have the right idea.” 

Finally, Cliff stops to think. What happens when they get arrested for breaking and entering? What happens when he hears about Cliff’s rap sheet? What happens when neither he nor Rick can afford a lawyer or a PR dive? He’ll have to leave California again. Nothing good ever happens when Cliff leaves California. Nothing good happens when he drinks whiskey sours. 

“No, no. ‘Fraid your old mentor's out of commission.” Cliff smiles at him, halfheartedly, and pours himself a glass from the cocktail shaker. 

“You don’t think I can do it,” Rick says, interrupting his trance. “You don’t think I can slip in and steal a ... steal a cocktail shaker, or something, something nobody would miss.” 

“No, I believe you can do it,” Cliff says, “I just think it’s a lousy idea.”

The lemon tangs in the back of Cliff’s mouth. He doesn’t even know why he’s still drinking. The liver on this kid, he thinks — it’ll send them both to an early grave. Rick’s looking around, still seriously considering this. It’s a cool night, a few days before the new year. People are asleep in their beds at this hour, asleep or having sex. 

“I’ll just do a sweep.” Rick stands up, stumbling a bit on his feet. “Just to see what I can see. If I’m not back in twenty minutes, then…”

“I’ll search for new employment.” 

“Fuckin' exactly.”

And then he’s gone. 

Cliff strains the last of the drink from the metal shaker for himself. Always with the sours — why? A man’s man, a real Humphrey Bogart type, would take his bourbon with a little water. An average functioning alcoholic would make do with some bottom-shelf rye and wake up in a pool of his own vomit. But with Rick it’s always the elaborate siphoning of the egg white and the passionate shaking of the citrus juice and sugar syrup and the adornment of the maraschino cherry, bobbing obscenely at the top of the ice. What does it say about a man if he can’t take his whiskey straight, if he has to disguise it in sweetened froth? On the other hand, Cliff thinks, what does it say about him, to turn that into a value judgment? 

He doesn’t think about how stupid it is, letting him go out breaking into houses while blind drunk. At this point, talking Rick out of stupid things was above his pay grade.

* * *

**one hour later**

“N-no no no no no no _ow_ be fucking careful, Cliff.” 

“You’re fine.” With a god-awful sound, Cliff removes the last bit of glass from Rick’s shoulder, dropping the tweezers in the bowl on the coffee table. He starts to rub at the tendons in his wrist, numb after a half-hour of pinching away. “I think I got it.” 

“Is — is that the last of it?” 

“I don’t know. I’ll take another pass at it in the morning.”

“I hear sirens. I hear fucking sirens.”

“Of course there are sirens, Ricky,” Cliff says. “You broke into a fucking house.” He picks up the cheap hundred-proof he found in the cabinet. “Now this is gonna sting.”

Later, Rick cleans himself off in the bathroom sink, gingerly wiping the dried blood away with a rag. The cut isn’t too deep, but stretches up to his neck. Cliff lingers in the doorframe, partly to get a look in the light, partly to make sure Rick doesn’t collapse again.

“If the makeup lady sees, I'll never hear the end of it.” 

“Oh, that’s nothing.” Cliff pulls at the collar of his shirt, showing him the jagged scars twisting along his shoulder — thick, rootlike. “If anything, it adds character. Just tell her you fell through a plate glass door.” 

“That’s what happened.”

“So why lie?” 

“What’s the one you have—“ Rick hesitates, but points to his collarbone. “There. What’s that from?"

Cliff fiddles at the hem of his shirt, feeling the spot. He wonders when Rick noticed it. “Bowie knife. They missed.”

“Really?”

“Really.” He leans against the doorframe with one arm. “Long fuckin’ story. It was a stupid mistake.” 

* * *

A decade later, Cliff is lying on a hospital stretcher, coming down on acid, and even as he tries to distract himself with the fractals of light and the sound of his pulse hooked up to the heart monitor, all he can think about is this moment:

* * *

“You know,” Rick says, throwing the bloodied washcloth in the sink, “I don’t think I understand the character any better, but I do know one thing.”

“What’s that?” 

“I think — I think I’m beginning to ... unravel you.” Rick glances at him through the mirror. 

“Unravel?”

“Understand,” he says, correcting himself. “Understand. I need to sleep.”

And then Rick pushes past him in the doorframe, arm brushing against shoulder, and falls into bed, as if they had already been doing this for nine years. Cliff stands there a while, just watching, processing.

“You’re killing me, kid,” says Cliff, though he’s not sure what he means.

“Don’t call me that,” says Rick, already face-down in a pillow. That’s the last he can remember. 

* * *

Rick comes to with a head-splitting hangover. His torn suit coat is strewn over the edge of the bed, an abandoned tumbler on the dresser, an ashtray on the floor. No Cliff. But the things he stole from the condo are all here, arranged on the cheap carpet: the bottle of scotch (with gift bag,) the deck of cards, and the blender. He’d never owned a blender. Never wanted one, either. 

The choices felt random; the first things he had seen, probably, while pacing the living room. Then at some point he’d toppled backward through the glass door. How did nothing else break? He must have gotten up and ran with the blender and the bottle under each arm. He closes his eyes and tries to retrace his steps, like a blackout-drunk detective, but suddenly his eyelids feel heavy and he dozes off again. When the front door creaks open, he jumps to his feet, terrified — but it’s only Cliff, holding a paper bag.

“What time is it?” Rick asks. 

Cliff shrugs. “Around quarter to three.” 

“Sorry,” he mutters, for no reason. He goes to open the blinds, then flops onto the sofa. 

If anything, back then Cliff looked even more out of place. Yesterday's undershirt, a work jacket, blue jeans, boots — closer to a mechanic than a stunt veteran. The only giveaway was the dark glasses. And he was built; Rick didn’t like to think about it, exactly, but he noticed it. Not movie-star built, but built like he’d been working with his hands his whole life. Like he held his own in a fight many times over. 

“I brought bagels.” Cliff realizes he’s never seen this place in the light. The sun doesn’t do it any favors. “How’s the shoulder?”

Rick reaches up and touches, gingerly. Everything is still raw. There’s dried blood stuck to his hair. “Not — it’s not good.”

“Alright. Don’t mess with it.” He throws the paper sack onto the coffee table; Rick tears into a bagel. Hands in his pockets, Cliff surveys the things on the floor. “Pretty decent haul.” 

“Now we can make daiquiris,” Rick mutters. The inside of his mouth tastes like hell. “I need a shower.” 

“Go,” he says. “Then we’ll play gin."

“I don’t know how."

“I’ll teach you.” 

Under the hot water, Rick interrogates himself: this isn’t happening, is it? It’s completely in his head, which, as he already knows, is a dangerous place. What happens when a guy like Cliff starts to think a guy like him is ... he doesn’t have words for it, just feelings, sensations: rough around the edges? Soft in the center? What happens if it’s not in his head? What if every touch, every remark up until now was a deliberate seduction? 

By the time he’s freshly shaved, teeth brushed, he has scrubbed himself clean, but can’t shake the grimy, cold feeling inside him. He needs hot coffee and smoke in his lungs. He pours in extra cream and sugar and sticks the pack of Red Apples in the front pocket of his robe. 

Gin rummy is easier to learn than he thought. Cliff keeps score on a pad of paper, adding the totals together in a few pencil-strokes. They kill a few hours that way, just talking and drinking coffee and playing cards across from each other, until it’s around five or six and the air has turned stale and sweaty. No cops have come knocking. No aggrieved neighbors have come looking for their blender. 

Finally Rick can put a name to that feeling from before: the thrill of getting away with something he shouldn’t.

“I owe you, for all this,” he says at some point, gesturing to his bandaged arm and shoulder. 

“No you don't.” Cliff sits back, pushing his drink away from him. “When you really owe me a favor, I’ll let you know.” 

“Like when you have to knock someone’s lights out for me?” 

Cliff just laughs. “I doubt it’ll ever come to that.”

* * *

Actually, there was one time. But it was a few years later in Vegas, not long after _McClusky_. They were leaving a kitschy casino off the Strip — Rick stumbling, Cliff stone-cold sober — when a guy recognized them. Rick had stopped talking to fans, if you could even call them that. It felt tacky. If you were a celebrity, you didn’t have to humor anyone.

But this pissed off the guy in the casino parking lot, in his nylon shirt, and the guy felt it appropriate to call him a queer; which made Cliff a queer, too, by proxy. The very insinuation drove Rick into a complete rage. He’d started it, not Cliff, that was the important part; he’d lunged at the guy, and the guy had shoved back, and before he could blink Cliff had the guy on the ground. The whole thing was over in five seconds flat. No tough-guy stuff. “Get in the car,” Cliff said to him. 

And so he did; he crawled into the passenger seat of the car and wept, because, was that his life now?

For his part, Cliff kept his own liaisons private. There was a gas station on some corner of Van Ness where, supposedly, a fellow would fix you up on a date, if you could call it that. People were giddy, almost, to name names, who was queer, who wasn’t: Charles Laughton, Vincent Price, Cary Grant. 

Not that there was much reason to worry. Rick could be sleazy, but there were factors that made him incompatible with hookers: emotions, whiskey dick, and the fact Cliff was always hanging around. He had seen Rick almost try to initiate in Vegas, on that same trip, but he was falling over himself before they even got to the elevator. 

That night, it was Cliff who paid the drink tab, Cliff who apologized to the prostitute, Cliff who helped him upstairs into the suite he couldn’t afford. Cliff told him: no, you are going to be sick, stay on the floor. Cliff made sure he didn’t fall asleep there and choke to death. When Judy Garland and Elvis Presley died on their toilets within a decade of each other, Cliff felt quietly relieved that Rick missed out on a trend. 

But, all things considered, that trip wasn’t that bad. There was the night of his DUI, the night he got alcohol poisoning and ended up in Cedars-Sinai. All Rick really remembers is that Cliff was there — he was ashamed, later, but then it didn’t matter. Everything was lush, grand, like the black and white movies he wanted to star in as a kid, all the leading men with their slick hair and fine tuxedos and clouds of smoke. Until it wasn’t.

When he is finally alone, he surfaces on a thin white cot, in a hospital gown, talking half-lucidly to his male nurse in the drunk tank. 

“I don’t know what I’m going to do next,” Rick says. “Where I’m going to go from here.” 

“You’ll be back,” says the nurse.

* * *

**1959**

The night after the amateur robbery, they begin a long tradition of going to dinner and getting drunk. 

“You could have been a star, Cliff,” Rick says to him, without a trace of irony. “You have that kinda face, that kind of presence. You must know that.”

Cliff knew he had an effect on people, but he’d never heard it described this way. Manipulative shitbag felt more familiar. He shrugs, sipping at his drink. “It never interested me.” 

“People shouldn’t act.” Rick leans back in his chair, his voice warm. “Unless they have egos made of shatterproof glass. But you. You have something special.” 

“I do, huh?” 

They sit there, not drinking their drinks. 

“You’re a smooth driver, for one thing,” Rick says. “But it’s — there’s something else.”

“And what’s that?”

“Let’s get out of here,” he says, impulsively. 

Cliff seems surprised but as nonchalant as ever. “And go where?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere — somewhere private-like.” Rick grits his teeth. “I mean right now."

Cliff smiles at the little twang in his right now. “Private-like,” he says.

* * *

**eight minutes later**

He covers Rick’s mouth with his hand when he comes. In the bathroom stall, with anyone liable to walk in and overhear them, it feels warranted — but pressing him up against the metal wall, jerking him off with his free hand, is a bit of a power trip, too. It was so simple, after all. Cliff was there for him. Cliff listened, Cliff rallied, comforted, joked, and knew when to be quiet, which was often. He was there to take care of him.

This thought, of being taken care of, is what brings the orgasm, not the somewhat rough touch or the live-wire anxiety of a semi-public handjob. Rick likes his hands: sliding up his torso, undoing his belt, holding him there. He likes his mouth, kissing him roughly, breathing down his neck, cheeks rough with stubble, leaving marks below the collar, nothing if not professional. Silent, except for the hush in his ear, meant to provoke him. It felt like he could reduce him to a molecule, make him forget everything, every line in his head, every pretext, every fear. He could hold him right in his hand.

“C’mon. Let’s settle up.” Cliff kisses him, once, then opens the door with his hip, going to wash his hands. “We have to finish our gin game."

* * *

**1969**

“Do you feel different, after your brush with the other side?” Rick teases, as he spreads cream cheese on a bagel with a plastic knife, stolen from a hospital break room. 

“I got nowhere near the other side.” Cliff sips at his stale coffee. “Unless you count devil shit.” 

They’re joking, but Rick’s face is twisted-up, turning red, somewhere between anger and relief. They’re joking, but only to hide the fact how fucking terrified they are, still are, at the mere idea of losing each other. 

“I was worried,” Rick says, after a while, wiping away tears. 

“Well, don’t be. You’re not rid of me yet, kid.” 

Rick reaches out for the hand that isn’t hooked to an IV, and squeezes. 

* * *

**1966**

“How are you, old buddy?” says Rick.

Cliff flips on the lights of his old shitty coupe, takes a breath, and says: “We’re not doing that right now.” 

“Missed having you around,” he says, in that tired drawl. “I’ve — I’ve worked with a lot of stuntmen, you know, but we never hit it off like you and me.” 

“That so?” Cliff says, putting the car in drive. They leave the precinct. As they drive along, they see his car, smashed into an alleyway.

“I mean — shit.” Rick waves his hand in the air, as if to shoo away all the pretext. He’s still drunk. “That didn’t mean anything, that shit is private, it’s between you and me, but — besides all that. We got along. Didn’t we? You’re — you’re a fun guy, Cliff. You’re just scared to show it. But I know you have some stories.” 

* * *

"So you’re some kinda war hero?” Rick asked him once, when they were both blind drunk. “I know you don’t wanna — I — 

“I killed people. With a gun. That’s all there was to it.”

Which wasn’t true, but he didn’t want to scare him with that shit, not tonight. He wants Rick to understand — but man, has he seen some things — and he’s just considering the things he’s seen, not the things he’s done. 

As for things he’s done: He fucked someone in a Dresden warehouse and in abandoned barracks (same guy, too;) he got so used to stepping over German bodies he began to imagine they were twigs; he wept over a woman’s corpse and then slipped it into the ocean like it was nothing (you got rid of the wife, but not the boat — very smart, Cliff.)

* * *

Only once does Cliff fuck him while inside of a marriage, and it’s technically the night before Rick’s first. They're in Cliff’s hotel room, after some idiotic row between him and the fiancee, some accusation of flirting with a cocktail waitress or gold digging or having an age-old affair with his valet. She’s the one marrying the B-list actor; what does she have to lose? 

Rick can’t take his eyes off him. They’d barely spoken before it happened — it started fast and desperate and ended up solemn and slow — he is almost husbandly in the way he fucks him, the way he hoists Rick off the bed by his thighs and cradles him and looks down like he’s examining something he lost and finally, finally has back again. A sob catches in Rick’s throat. Cliff sets him down gently, kisses the corners of his eyes, cleans the tears from his face. 

“Tell me what you need,” he whispers. 

Rick just shakes his head. “Just stay here,” he says. “Just stay here.” 

Afterwards, Cliff pours himself more champagne, which Rick has spiked with some sort of brandy and bitters and lemon rind. He begins to consider his own role in a long tradition of caretakers, drivers, silent husbands.

* * *

In the mid-1970s, Rick, tired of the work he was getting, wrote his own screenplay to star in. The plot is more or less null — a gunman, fresh out of prison, tracks down an ex-gunman to avenge the other gunman’s gunman. There is chasing, shooting, a girl, a church confession. The important part was that Rick considered it the sum of his efforts, a raw and deeply personal opus. Cliff saw it through many drafts. 

It always had the same final tableau: a man holding another man in his arms, both of them riddled with bullets. Early on in the first act, one man always says to the other, _I am beginning to unravel you._


End file.
